Previously in the Vines Inquiry— In an effort to assert himself as a proud member of the Vines family (as opposed to its ill-favored offshoot), Frank investigated his father’s office. But in his search for a place to belong, he may have accidentally locked himself in a tomb. —- He heard two loud clicks, like plans of wood falling off a truck; one from each side of the room. The doors, thought Frank.
Frank shoved the drawer, forced it, lifted it to try and get it back on the rails, but it wouldn’t budge. He scanned the papers inside. There was nothing but more chicken scratch—a whole drawer of scrap. As he struggled, Frank heard a ticking from inside the digital clock that was growing faster. His first thought, like any child of 90s action movies, was a bomb.
He thought it was best to try and ignore that. tried to ignore that.
Deep breath. Stay calm. Check the doors.
He spoke aloud, tethering himself down from the panic. “I was overreacting last night. I’m overreacting now. It’s an office gag. One of Aunt Toni’s famous Christmas pranks.” The fact that he couldn’t recall any others…well, that might explain why was he so scared.
The ticking hastened.
It was joined by a whirring. Fishing line winding lightning fast til it bounced taut. The ticking didn’t stop. The whine got louder. Stronger. He could hear plucks, a heavy metal violin shredding an angel hair bow. It started alone.
A pop. Frank heard it right next to his ear. The tiny collapse of a single bubble wrap dome meeting its end. He whipped around as something moved at the corner of his eye. Frank moved for the door Aunt Toni had led him in through. He needed reason. He needed air—
—and to confirm some tomb lock hadn’t fallen into place. He made it two steps before another pop.
This time it was behind him. A whistle across the room. Dust motes drifted in the air, still visible in the waning December sunlight. Two feathers, grey-white, fell in front of his nose. One with fluffy plumage, the other all spine and tendril.
A third pop and whistle. Frank turned his neck hard enough to make it sore.
One feather, his brain shouted! One. Not two.
Panic.
This is my house.
It’s not.
I’m making myself at home.
Pop.
I’m making myself at home.
This cave is taken.
He ran at the door but it did not move. Frank kicked it, something inside—his heart or his memory—telling him how to. Steady, weight on the back foot, heave the momentum, tighten your core. His heel ached from the impact, like hitting a wall made of stone. He listened and realized the ticking had stopped.
Was it over, then?
This cave is taken.
Or ready?
Another pop, the loudest yet, like it was coming from inside Frank’s ear. He flinched and immediately thought how dumb that was, to die with your eyes closed. When he opened them, it was all the same. The room was stable. All that vibrated new, out of focus, was his arm. It was warm, like he’d crossed to the sunny side of the street.
Frank looked down and saw bare skin while a wisp of his Christmas sweater laid in a pile beneath him. He crouched down, eyes squinting on a face that he’d never admit looked just like his father’s, and picked up the fabric. It was a perfect circle of material, with the edge beyond clean. No thread fraying at all. He thought it must have all split at once.
No, not split. “Cut.”
This cave is taken. By beasts with sharper teeth than yours.
Another swish zipped through the office. Another. Faster than they’d been; a suspension bridge giving way. A swish grazed his exposed shoulder, dousing his skin in the red & warmth of a shark in summer water.
Something zipped by the right of his head and chopped off a chunk of hair. Frank yelped and dropped to the floor, laid out flat. He’d forced the drawer. Pulled the fuse.
I’m overreacting. But lessons will repeat until they are learned. “We have plenty of security,” his parents had said.
Frank looked around from his stomach, only just tucking his legs as one pop blasted towards him, taking the sole of his shoe with it. It came to a vibrating rest at his side.
A wire, so thin he could just barely see it in the sunlight. Thin enough to wisp through the cracks in the floorboards. The seams in the antique wallpaper.
Swish. Swish swish snap. Three more came. Then five. He crawled away, leaving bloody handprints stamped into the floor. Tiny waves of sawdust erupted between planks as wires burst into the room. Where was safe? What was happening? The second question could wait. No such thing as a stupid one maybe, but a time and place.
Frank crawled to his dad’s desk and reached up a hand, pawing for the clock. A switch. Something had to be there. Beneath an award, or maybe a decorative globe? He’d never actually seen the National Treasure movies, ok??? Instead, his hand came down on the desk’s corner. The innards. The pale wood within after a corner had been shorn away.
He didn’t have time to second guess. Frank scrambled, low and fast as he could, under the desk. He pulled his legs in as a flash of wire scraped against the corner, exploding a cloud of sawdust into the air.
He saw the office chair get diced into uneven chunks as he hugged his legs tighter. Part of him wanted to watch; wanted to see the planet that was about to smash into Earth, wanted to stare down his demise and face whatever end it might bring.
But he couldn’t.
Shaking, Frank closed his eyes and counted to ten. He couldn’t see it. He couldn’t see. He had never seen.
All the strange rituals. The dinner guests who wore masks and spoke of places that hadn’t felt sunlight in eons. Bedtime stories, they promised, even as they pulled out the very treasures they were meant to be fictionalizing, eager to show the spoils to the crowd. So many aunts and uncles he swore he’d met only to hear they’d been dead for fifty years.
He couldn’t see it happening.
Why hadn’t he seen it?
It had to be over soon. There had to be a limit to his house’s treacherousness.
When he got to “seven” there was a final clang; a mallet falling on the heavy metal violin, and the room was quiet. The reverb of that final swish scratched behind his eyeballs as Frank dared to open them.
In front of him, a fine wire mesh was spread across the entrance to his hiding place. He pressed his good shoe against it and the wire cut into the water-logged leather without even flexing.
With a big gulp and sweaty palms, Frank peeked out from under the desk, bending his neck at a painful angle, and found the intricate web that now filled his father’s office. A wire nicked his ear, pain like a bee sting. A foot in front of him, a fly chopped itself clean in half, leaving not so much as a colorful smear of guts on the silver line.
“Oh,” he said with the same care as when he saw a toddler fall over. He reached out towards the fly, as if he might still be able to help it, pausing just in time.
Frank moved as careful as he could out from under the desk and still ended up with clothes in tatters and dozens of cuts. When he was able to look at the open desk drawer again, he was down to underpants and one blood-stained sock.
With everything already sprung, he hoped, Frank carefully moved to the side of the desk where the open drawer had been nicked a few times, but remained intact. He looked for a second bear trap device that might spring up if he reached in the drawer, but saw nothing.
“Maybe that’s why they wanted me home. Innovation.” The voice in his head doubted him. “Hey, a millennial would know that you should always do a second booby trap!”
Frank looked to the sky, speaking non-committedly to any deity that might listen. “But I’m not saying to do it and teach me a lesson…please.”
He looked around the room for an angle of escape but could only see an impassable web of deadly wires. He crept back under the desk, the work of five minutes, and pulled his phone from the scraps of his pants on the floor.
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